Chapter 64

Valerie spent Friday reviewing and writing documentation for the work she had finished over the prior three weeks. Neither she nor Lucca said anything directly, but she knew it was the last time she would touch those systems, and she wanted to leave things neat for whoever might need to revisit the projects later.

Her work day was somber and tedious. Though she tried to lose herself in the last scraps of work she had, anxiety and sadness gnawed at her the whole time, and it was a struggle to engage deeply with drafting documentation.

She and Lucca had not discussed the box again, but she imagined she could feel it, lurking out in the hangar, a dark and menacing psychic presence.

“I thought I could take you out for a nice dinner, since tonight’s our last night.”

Valerie startled. When Lucca spoke, she had been staring at some system manual, re-reading the same paragraph for the fourth or fifth time. She could not even recall what system the manual belonged to.

“Huh?”

“Reno isn’t exactly a culinary Mecca but there are a few good spots.”

“What, like a date?”

Valerie thought it was the first time she had managed to leave Lucca speechless.

“I—” they replied, but did not get any further than the single syllable.

“Just joking. I guess I forgot to eat lunch again… dinner would probably be good.”

“I… also bought a dress for you to wear. If you want. The restaurant doesn’t have a dress code exactly, but it’s kind of a nice place.”

They gestured toward her outfit, jeans and a pink hoodie with just a sports bra underneath.

“They’d let you in like that but you might feel a bit under-dressed.”

Valerie sat quietly for a long time, staring at her laptop monitor. Lucca shifted uneasily, just at the edge of her vision.

“You,” she started, and then paused for a few seconds more before continuing, “…bought me a dress?”

“Is that okay? It’s not fancy… I can return it.”

“No, sorry, it’s fine. That’s just… a lot to think about right now.”

She raised her hands to cover her face for a moment, and drew in a shaky breath. She scrubbed her fingertips through the hair on the sides of her head. She had never found the right time to actually get a hand trimming it, and the messiness was starting to bother her. Too late to worry about that.

“Heather… didn’t like me wearing skirts or dresses. Or owning them. Anything too girly would set her off. Guaranteed fight.”

“That’s fuckin’ awful.”

“Yeah. Well,” she replied, her words half speech and half rueful laughter. “After she left, money was too tight for much wardrobe experimentation.”

She reached to closed the laptop lid; the motion was habitual, tidying up her workspace at the end of each day. The ritual had helped keep Lucca’s clutter at bay, at least for her small part of the office, and it had marked the transition from working time to leisure.

It’s not just the end of the day, she realized, not just a Friday.

Tears rolled freely down her cheeks as the lid magnets caught and the laptop snapped shut.

“You know,” she said, softly, “I almost made it a week without really crying. I still think that’s a record for me.”

She stood and turned to face Lucca; they looked hesitant, and a little awkward. They liked tears well enough, she had learned, when they were brought out at the business end of a whip; but they did not know what to do when the pain was purely emotional.

“Folks are usually happy to finish a project,” they offered, lamely.

“You could tell her I need more time. Another week. A month. Tell her that I fucked something up and I need to fix it.”

Lucca looked at her with sadness and pity. She did not feel better for what she saw reflected in that gaze.

Yeah, she thought quietly. I suppose I did fuck something up.

She treated herself to a hot shower; it might be her last, for a while. The water in her cell at Dana’s home only ran cold, and though she had used one of the other showers there regularly, she did not think she would be returning to a Dana that was in a particularly gracious mood.

The dress was a simple black wrap dress; Valerie wore a pair of her bike shorts underneath to help her tuck, and her black running shoes. She stared at herself in the mirror, on the verge of tearing the garment off and going in jeans and a hoodie after all.

Her mind had been eating itself out of anxiety for days, chewing at the edges of her sanity. Staring at herself in the mirror, in a dress, only reminded her of the way Heather had sneered in barely hidden disgust, and how small and worthless and ashamed that sneer had made her feel.

She shook her head to try and clear out the unbidden memories, and left her room quickly, skirt fluttering behind her, before she could change her mind.

The ride to Reno was uneventful. The restaurant was in a casino, and the transition from the quiet solitude of the desert to the raucous clamor within was jarring and unsettling. The restaurant itself was spacious, quiet, and dimly lit; and this second transition was doubly disorienting.

Sitting opposite Lucca, Valerie struggled to remain present. Her mind fixed on what the next day held, and her return to Dana’s custody, one way or another. Lucca told a story that Valerie could not even remember halfway through it. The food was very good, but she felt like every other person in the restaurant was staring at her, as if she were some mangy half-dead animal that had crawled through the door.

Driving east out of Reno, she watched the headlights illuminate the khaki colored desert. The landscape reminded her of where she had grown up; grim and desolate. The smaller roads that Lucca preferred to drive on had no street lights, and the car’s ancient yellow headlights threw weird shadows from utility poles and fence posts.

“You said you’d think about it,” Valerie spoke, after fifteen minutes of riding in silence.

“Think about what?”

Lucca spared a momentary glance aside at Valerie, before returning their attention to driving.

“The… letter. The box.”

Lucca drew in breath, and let it out again in a sigh. Valerie already knew what they were going to say.

“I won’t do it. I’m sorry. What Dana wants isn’t safe; it’s not even sane. I won’t stop you; you can take the letter, do it all yourself as best you can, but… I hope you won’t.”

Valerie sighed, in turn; a sigh that yearned to at least be disappointed, but she knew this answer was coming. I’ll think about it always seemed to mean no, ultimately.

“I have to.”

“No, you don’t,” they shot back, frustrated, with another momentarily glance aside to look at her. “You don’t even have to go back at all. You can tell her to go fuck herself.”

“And then? You already said I can’t stay with you.”

“We can figure something out. There are worse fates.”

“There’s no we here, Lucca. It’s just me. Alone. Doing the best I can.”

Lucca gave no response, and stared fixedly at the road in front of them. Valerie watched their hands grip the steering wheel, watched their nostrils flare as they exhaled.

“I’ll leave Dana if you leave your husband,” Valerie said, her voice small.

Lucca did not reply; and Valerie was not disappointed by this, either. They rode in silence for a few more minutes.

“What’s the point?” Valerie asked, staring out the passenger window at the desert that was growing increasingly familiar as they neared Lucca’s land.

“Of what?” they asked in reply.

“Anything. Everything. Your… compound. Whatever.”

Lucca was quiet for long enough that Valerie reasoned they were not going to answer.

“Never mi—” she started, but Lucca interrupted her.

“I wanted to build something. Want to build something.”

“Why?”

Lucca inhaled deeply and slowly, like they were bracing for something painful.

“I wanted a place where the community, trans people, could be safe.”

Valerie laughed out loud, despite herself, the sound redolent with resignation, despair, and shock more than humor. Lucca winced, pursed their lips, and re-fixed their gaze on the road.

“Figures,” she said.

“What?”

She was silent for a moment. The thought that had burst out was complicated and hard to pin down into words.

“Not straight enough for my parents or Heather. Not slave enough for Dana. Not trans enough for you.”

“That’s… not what I meant.”

Lucca’s voice was quiet, an admission of failure and not a recrimination.

“Alright,” Valerie half-sighed, with a dejected shrug, ceding the point without contest. What does it matter, anyway?

“I can’t, Valerie. Matthew would find out and…”

They bit off the rest of the thought. Their hands gripped the steering wheel hard enough that their biceps were trembling.

“Yeah, yeah. I know. Forget it.”

The rest of the drive passed in tense, uncomfortable silence. Valerie rested her head against the glass of the passenger side window, absently wondering how much it would hurt if she opened the door and threw herself out onto the pavement speeding past.